For decades, various U.S. agencies have required many current and former employees to submit works that discuss their government service for review prior to publication. In recent years, the government’s prepublication-review processes have grown increasingly far-reaching and burdensome, resulting in escalating public and congressional concern about their legality and fairness.

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There is very little publicly available information regarding these policies, or the bodies within agencies that administer them. What little information is public, however, suggests that the prepublication-review criteria are vague, overbroad, and unequally enforced. This raises serious questions about whether prepublication review, as currently constituted, violates authors’ First Amendment right to speak and the public’s First Amendment right to receive important information about the government.

Gary Price (gprice@mediasourceinc.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. Before launching INFOdocket, Price and Shirl Kennedy were the founders and senior editors at ResourceShelf and DocuTicker for 10 years. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com, and is currently a contributing editor at Search Engine Land.